My Soul Is Not Poetry Poem by Patti Masterman

My soul is not poetry inside of it
and it is nothing pretty;
My insides are dead, rotting rhododendrons
beside a rusting pitch-fork
inside a barn, deserted for the last fifty years
and too dangerous, to ever go into.

But if it could go inside,
My un-poetry'd soul would hop, crawl, and climb,
in spite of its lameness
up the rickety old ladder, to the hayloft,
And there eat the little green apples,
already wormy
from the gnarled tree, outside the window.

My soul would peer out the window and look for any signs
of the once-life that used to abide here-
To feed it's ravenous hunger for poetry
and then develop the unavoidable belly-ache.

Of course, I know lots of others
whose soul is not poetry, either;
And we are all trying to re-light the same matches
once struck by people, who had flames burning them inside

Which they dutifully copied down onto damp, tear-stained pages;
(so the words would not burn up the paper)
And then there were the copy machines,
and printing presses, to duplicate their fires-
Like carrying a bit of coal to the next door, and the next one
so that everyone could have a bit of fire in Winter.

And the thick water, of all the world's approbation
soothed their old, weeping wounds
While the rest of us not-poets huddled around not-fires
in cold deserted barns,
and picked fresh flowers every day

So that we could earnestly watch them die
all over again, each day,
and pronounce it poetry,
while nobody noticed how many words
we managed to hemorrhage out.